NRMA Insurance appoints Accenture Song to lead customer experience growth
The insurer has tasked global digital creative group Accenture Song to reimagine its customer experience.
NRMA Insurance has appointed digital creative group Accenture Song to lead the transformation of its customer experience, a part of the insurer’s business that has been identified as a focus for future growth.
The insurer has a solid brand foundation to build upon, after investing in building awareness over the past decade.
According to Brand Finance’s 2024 rankings released in January, NRMA Insurance is Australia’s second-strongest brand, valued at $2bn. It’s also one of the fastest-growing brands, up 91 per cent on the previous year.
The investment in building the brand has helped pave the way for the customer experience transformation ahead, NRMA Insurance chief executive Julie Batch told The Growth Agenda.
NRMA Insurance was entering its 100th year, and its customer needs were changing, Ms Batch explained. She said customers were accessing their insurance more frequently, largely due to the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events.
Because of NRMA Insurance’s “member heritage”, the company had focused intently on retaining its existing customers, Ms Batch said.
Its customer retention rates were about 90 per cent, among the highest in the global insurance sector, she said.
However, the business had reached “a really important inflection point” in relation to how it engages with its customers, Ms Batch said.
“We’ve got (just by our existence) 100 years of data and information on things like weather events (and) road accidents.
“All those kinds of things that can help actually genuinely make Australians’ world safer, which is our purpose.
“I think that’s our opportunity … We haven’t accelerated the change fast enough.”
That said, the pace of this change will be considered. “We’ve set some targets about growth,” Ms Batch explained. “But we want to grow thoughtfully and carefully with customers that stick with us, so we’re not chasing ‘churn’. We want to build a long-term relationship with the customer.”
To nurture the interactions customers have with the NRMA Insurance business, Accenture Song will deliver an “end-to-end” series of services that will span marketing, customer experience, digital, design and communication.
Accenture Song’s global chief executive David Droga said: “(NRMA Insurance) is one of the greatest, most meaningful brands in Australia. It has been such an iconic brand for so long. Even though they’re leaders in their field, they want to do even more. And we feel flattered that they’re trusting us to do that.”
Mr Droga, one of the world’s most influential creative leaders, said there was an essential link between creativity and technology, and this would guide its work for the insurer.
“Technology needs creativity to humanise it and make it relevant. Creativity needs technology to give it scale and to be able to move at pace in the current world,” he said.
Accenture Song’s creative chairperson, renowned creative technologist Nick Law, said there was a “huge opportunity” to embrace the heritage of the NRMA Insurance brand alongside the acceleration of technology, which had been fuelled by the proliferation of generative AI over the past year.
“What that (brand) longevity has done is establish some principles that you can apply to the new things, and that’s really useful, but only if you apply it to the new things. That’s why this opportunity is so interesting,” he said.
Accenture Song has made numerous acquisitions in recent years to expand the breadth and depth of its capabilities, including two in Australia: consumer insights advisory Fiftyfive5, and as of last week, marketing technology company, The Lumery.
As the work to be done on “reimagining” NRMA Insurance’s customer experience is rolled out in the Australian market, the appointment of Accenture Song will grant the insurer access to the group’s local and global talent and services.
“When we look at our business, we have a huge customer reach in Australia. And yet, it’s tiny in the context of the world,” Ms Batch said.
“There are so many (lessons) that we can take from the experience of companies all around the world, and financial services companies all around the world, around the way that they are engaging with customers, rethinking their experience using digital (and) thinking about creativity differently.” Accenture Song has assembled its top local Australian and global creative mavens to lead the work, including Mr Droga and Mr Law as well as global chief creative officer Neil Heymann. Locally, it will be led by Accenture Song’s ANZ president Mark Green and creative leaders Beth O’Brien and Barbara Humphries.
Some of NRMA Insurance’s recent internal investments also reflect its intense focus on its customers. In 2023 a new team was created within the business to bring marketing and customer experience together.
To lead the department, NRMA Insurance created a new role: chief customer and marketing officer. It appointed Michelle Klein, a globally recognised marketing chief who repatriated to Australia from the US after leading the marketing charge at Meta.
Speaking exclusively to The Australian at the time, Ms Klein outlined her vision. “Putting customer and marketing together, I believe, is the future of marketing,” Ms Klein said.
“Putting customer and marketing together as one team is a huge shift, and the creativity will come out of us being customer-obsessed.”
As a business, NRMA Insurance looks both locally and offshore for innovation, and Accenture Song’s internationally connected network of services and talent was one of its reasons for entrusting the business with its customer experience work.
Accenture Song Australia and New Zealand president Mark Green said: “Song is a very global business. We do business and harness experts wherever they sit. And a lot of people say they do that, but it actually happens all the time. Whether that is in the airline industry, the automotive industry, or the insurance industry or banking.
“We’re bringing not just the ANZ team, but the whole global team to try and do something really exciting here.”
IAG’s Ms Batch said that NRMA Insurance saw its competitors as others that were mastering the customer experience.
“We see our competitive set in this market, not just as the insurance industry, actually. That’s the key competitive set. We really are a brand that’s front and centre in a consumer mind. So we’re looking at ourselves against other brands that are delivering great consumer experiences and customer experiences.
“What we want to do is lift the pace and work at the same speed they do.”
More Coverage
HCF readies for ad agency review as Clems senior staff exodus continues
Health insurance company HCF has severed ties with ad agency Clemenger BBDO following an agency merger and an exodus of senior leadership staff.
Cost-centre or growth driver? Creativity’s role in financial success
The empirical evidence is clear, writes Droga5’s Matt Michael, the companies that invest and prioritise creativity are financially more successful than their competitors.